Flooding triggered by monsoon rains in the past few days have left 1.5 million people homeless and damaged thousands of acres of paddy crop in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, officials said yesterday. Over 20,000 people were evacuated after hundreds of villages were cut off. Army troops were evacuating more villagers from coastal districts with the authorities braced for more rain.

?We are bothered about the fresh formation of a low pressure over the Bay of Bengal and are closely monitoring its movement,? Subash Pani, the state?s seniormost bureaucrat, told Reuters. The flood victims, with their houses submerged, were living in makeshift tents and surviving on dry food air-dropped by relief workers, witnesses said.

<B>Diseases</B>

Hundreds of people are killed every year in South Asia during the June-September monsoon season and millions displaced from their homes or marooned in their villages.

Monsoon rains have caused widespread damage this year. Hundreds of people have been killed in western and southern India and millions left homeless due to flooding. At least 140 people have been killed and thousands left homeless in the western desert state of Rajasthan in the past two weeks.

In Nepal, at least 50 people died last week in flash floods. Thousands have been evacuated to dry areas while officials are braced for any outbreak of diseases. Landslides and flash floods have also affected thousands of people in Pakistan.

In Orissa, continuous rains and flash floods in the past three months have already killed 70 people and crippled road and electricity networks, officials said. In restive Indian Kashmir, authorities declared a flood alert yesterday after the Himalayan region?s main rivers flowed above the danger mark, flooding villages and damaging crops.

Landslides triggered by incessant rains blocked a vital 300-km national highway linking Srinagar, the region?s summer capital, with the rest of the country, officials said.

<B>Sanjaya Jena</B>

HUMAN DRAMA

<B>Activists say farmer suicides touch record</B>

■ More than 100 cotton growers killed themselves in India?s richest state in August, marking the highest monthly number of suicides in five years by farmers whose mounting crop loans drive them to death, activists said. The spate of suicides in the western state of Maharashtra took the toll to more than 900 this year and the wave has not abated despite highly publicised efforts by New Delhi to ease the financial burdens.

Debt-ridden farmers have been killing themselves in alarming numbers in four Indian states and government statistics have recorded about 3,600 suicides in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala in the last five years. Maharashtra has been severely hit this year as farmers have failed to procure loans for seed and fertilisers, and those who borrowed money to sow cotton saw their crop destroyed by heavy rains in the past month. ?The rate of suicide now is about three per day,? said Sharad Joshi, chief of Shetkari Sangathan, a powerful farmers? lobby in Maharashtra.